Christian Smith (sociologist)

Christian Smith is an American sociologist, currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith’s research focuses primarily on religion in modernity, adolescents and emerging adults, sociological theory, American evangelicalism, and culture.

Biography

Smith attended Wheaton College (IL) (1978–1979) and received his BA from Gordon College (MA) in 1983. He spent a year studying theology at Harvard Divinity School before earning his MA (1987) and PhD (1990) from Harvard University. Smith was a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 12 years before moving to Notre Dame. Smith was conferred the Gordon College Alumnus of the Year Award in October, 2007. He has been awarded more than $14 million worth of research grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Lilly Endowment Inc., the John Templeton Foundation, and other foundations and institutes.

Awards

Smith has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors. Most recently, he was awarded Christianity Today’s 2010 Distinguished Book Award for his 2009 book, co-authored with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults.^[1] He previously won Christianity Today’s 2005 Distinguished Book Award for his 2005 book, co-authored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Michael Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith was the winner of the “2001 Outstanding Book Award" from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Smith is also the winner of the 2001-2002 Excellence in Mentoring Award, from the Graduate Student Association of the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and winner of the 1995-96 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Sociology Graduate Student Association Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. He was co-author on 1999 “Outstanding Article Award,” granted by the American Sociological Association Section on the Sociology of Religion, for Mark Regnerus and Christian Smith, “Selective Deprivatization Among American Religious Traditions: the Reversal of the Great Reversal,” in Social Forces, in 1998.

Bibliography

Smith is author, co-author, and editor of numerous scholarly books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and research reports. A selection of Smith’s books includes:

• Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (2011) (Oxford)
• What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (2010) (Chicago)
• Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Do Not Give Away More Money (2008) (Oxford)
• Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (2009), with Patricia Snell (Oxford)^[2]
• Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005), with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Oxford)
• Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (2003) (Oxford)
• The Secular Revolution (2003) (California)
• Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (2000) (California)
• Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2000), with Michael Emerson (Oxford)
• American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998), with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink (Chicago)
• Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (1996) (Chicago)
• The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (1991) (Chicago)

Theoretical Contributions

Smith’s larger theoretical agenda has been to move culture, morality, and identity to the center of sociological theorizing generally and the sociology of religion specifically. Moral, Believing Animals underscored the morally oriented, narrative-referencing, and epistemologically anti-foundationalist condition of human personhood. In his work on American evangelicals, Smith developed a “subcultural identity” theory of religious persistence and strength in the modern world that emphasizes identity, cognitive perception, and symbolic boundary drawing. Smith’s The Secular Revolution emphasized the centrality of culture, agency, and moral vision by religiously hostile actors in the secularization of American public life.

Smith’s recent work on the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. adolescents and emerging adults emphasizes the interplay of broad cultural influences, family socialization, and religious motivations in forming teenagers' life outcomes. Smith’s early work on social movements emphasized not only structural political opportunities but also personal moral motivations for participation in social movement activism. Behind and contributing to these sociological emphases are the philosophical works of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, a critical realist philosophy of social science, and an interpretive-hermeneutical understanding of sociology.

Smith’s recent What is a Person? draws upon critical realism, philosophical personalism, and Charles Taylor’s phenomenological epistemology to advance a model of the human person which Smith argues is needed ultimately for any sociological theories and analysis to make sense. Arguing that every sociological analysis and explanation presupposes, explicitly or implicitly, some assumptions about human persons, Smith critiques many extant presupposed models of persons as problematic in various ways. He then argues the model he advances on the basis of “critical realist personalism” to be more adequate for the sociological task. Smith works out his argument by critically engaging sociological social constructionism, network structuralism, and the dominant variables paradigm. What is a Person? concludes with two chapters seeking to overcome modernity’s fact-value divide and undermine the “is-ought” divorce, explaining how descriptive knowledge about human persons can inform normative views of what is good, right, and just in human and social life.

Smith is also the Principal Investigator of the Science of Generosity project, which seeks to advance social scientific knowledge about the sources, manifestations, and consequences of generosity in all of its forms. He continues to lead the National Study of Youth and Religion, the panel study of which is set to conduct a fourth wave of data collection in 2013, when the sample will be ages 24–29. Smith also continues his research and theorizing in critical realism, human personhood, sociological theories of action, multiple modernities, morality, and American religion.

See also

• Moralistic therapeutic deism
• Center for the Study of Religion and Society

References

1. ^ Religion News: Christian magazine announces book awards
2. ^ The Fate of the Spirit

External links

• Christian Smith's homepage
• Christian Smith's CV
• Jones, Tony. "Youth and Religion: An Interview with Christian Smith". Youth Specialties. http://www.youthspecialties.com/articles/youth-and-religion-an-interview-with-christian-smith/. 
• National Study of Youth and Religion
• Science of Generosity

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Name	Smith, Christian
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Date of birth	1960
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